How bad is it out there? Even a cursory scan of the news paints a grim picture of an America on the brink: broken roads, crumbling bridges, dimmed streetlights, shuttered clinics and scrapped school programs. Everywhere one turns, the nation’s basic infrastructure—built in the twentieth century to connect communities and care [...]
By ROBERT PEAR
Published: December 24, 2009
WASHINGTON — The Senate voted Thursday to reinvent the nation’s health care system, passing a bill to guarantee access to health insurance for tens of millions of Americans and to rein in health costs as proposed by President Obama.
The 60-to-39 party-line vote, on the 25th straight day of debate on [...]
Congress plays make-believe, but the bill to taxpayers is real.
HAVING PASSED a health reform bill that is, at least theoretically, paid for, the House of Representatives is poised this week to blow a quarter-trillion-dollar hole in the federal budget involving, you guessed it, health care. This is the so-called doc fix, to prevent scheduled cuts [...]
Armed with favorable cost estimates from the Congressional Budget Office and emboldened, perhaps, by the self-destructive behavior of the health insurance lobby, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to propose that her caucus unite behind a reform bill with a strong public insurance option. She will do so at a Wednesday meeting of House Democrats, according [...]
By Vincent Carroll
Repeat after me: Health care reform is going to save us money. Health care reform is going to save us money. Pay no attention, please, to the fact that the Senate Finance Committee’s bill imposes fees on insurance providers, as well as producers of drugs and medical devices, that it caps deductions for [...]
By Michael Barone
Some of the headlines in recent days are not worthy of belief. No, I’m not referring to the headlines that Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, however odd that many seem to many (including, it seems, Obama himself). I’m referring to the headlines earlier in the week to the effect that the [...]
By Jay Cost
So, the CBO score of the Baucus bill has the mainstream media declaring this a victory for the Democrats’ health care efforts. The New York Times leads the way:
Health Care Bill Gets Green Light in Cost Analysis
The Senate Finance Committee legislation to revamp the health care system would provide coverage to 29 million [...]
By Kristin Jensen and Edwin Chen
Sept. 23 (Bloomberg) — White House Budget Director Peter Orszag said health-care legislation can be completed in six weeks and may largely be based on a measure being drafted by the U.S. Senate Finance Committee.
“The goal would be, yes, over the next six weeks or so, maybe sooner,” Orszag said [...]
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
THE elderly were the first group to turn against President Obama’s health-care pro posals, alienated by the plans to cut $500 billion cut from Medicare. The young and the uninsured may be the next to jump ship — out of worry over about the huge premiums they’d have to pay.
Requiring [...]
In his first five months, President Obama has reached into his bag and pulled out a dazzling number of misleading rhetorical tricks.
Let’s begin with his much-touted claim that his Administration is responsible for having “saved or created” at least 150,000 American jobs, even though we have shed well over a million jobs since Obama took [...]
